" The ancient ideas of alchemy and androgyny run deeply in the thoughts of Shelly. Frankenstein must be read as the imagination of Shelly reaching to explain desire for the perfect form, removed from the necessity of God, and truly human possibility through the wisdom of modern science matched to the illumination of the Alchemists, philosophically webbed by neo-platonism. The androgynous person represented for Shelly the union of nature, Perfection, Oneness and peace. The androgynous ancient person was also a model for the idea society, the goal of all human relationships. The model as such is revealed time and again in his poetry, particularly in the witch of Atlas. The androgynous witch herself the creation of an alchemical wedding of the Sun and the Moon, a golden cave with secret Scrolls and life-giving Waters surrounds the witch. Her creation calls all of nature to her presence and from her is miraculously born a hermaphrodite. The world in peace, unity, and balance, comes a sort of alechemistic dream and gives birth to androgyny. In like manner, Frankenstein must be seen as an alchemical inspired tail towards a perfect being, a new Society, a civilization whose Promethean reach has exceeded God. The experimental creature goes astray but even here Shelly is likely critiquing fellow Visionaries and their failed goals. Recall that Victor Frankenstein, a student at Ingolstadt ( the home of Adam Weishaupt and the Bavarian Illuminati) was set on an irreversible path towards the creatures incarnation while reading the works of the medieval Alchemists, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, and Albertus Magnus. The city, the studies, the alchemical goals for man and society being are apparent immediately."
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